What’s the most popular restaurant food in Washington?

Conventional wisdom says that it’s tough to find great Mexican food in our region, but a new survey suggests that we at least have a lot of it.

Estately, using numbers from Urbanspoon, recently calculated “what type of restaurants each state has in abundance.” There were five winners common to every state — American fare, burgers, sandwiches, fast food and pizza. After those, regional differences started coming into play. Mexican restaurants led the list in Washington, as well as in 16 other states. Seafood was the champ in my home state of Delaware, as well as in Alaska and eight other states. North Dakota and South Dakota were the leaders in steakhouses.

I asked the Estately folks for more data on Washington. Some interesting tidbits in the reply:

“Like all the other states, Washington’s top five categories were American (11.96%), burgers (7.62%), sandwiches (7.39%), fast food (6.73%), pizza (5.84%). We excluded these from our map because they were pretty much universal.

Compared to other states, Washington was particularly low on buffets and barbecue. Interestingly, Washington has fewer than half as many fast food restaurants as Alabama, even though Washington’s population is considerably larger.”

About us

Bethany Jean Clement is The Seattle Times food writer. Her writing has also appeared in Best Food Writing, Food & Wine, Gourmet.com, Beard House, Town & Country, Edible Seattle, The Stranger and more. Follow her on Twitter: @BJeanClement.